Monday, February 16, 2015

Slow and Lonely Work

Writing a book is hard work. There is absolutely no way to get the instant gratification I crave.

I’ve been compiling bits and pieces, blog posts, articles, and pictures over the past eight years since we adopted Allie. I pulled together 66,000 words from various sources and condensed them into a 75 page manuscript of about 21,000 words to enter into a contest where the top three prizes were different flavored publishing contracts.

The result was a finished product that was not a finished product. This was a difficult conclusion to come to, but come to it I did. I decide to send what the contest officials rejected to friends for feedback. I picked a range friends who have different relationships with me. Some are friends that are close now and some were close during another season of my life. Some walked through the early days of our story with us. One of the guys I tapped for feedback doesn’t know me or my story at all which is helpful. He doesn’t have a dog in this fight and I’ve received invaluable and knowledgeable comments.

I’ve tried to keep my work away from people who will tell me I’m awesome. I have this recurring nightmare where I’m standing in front of Simon Cowell and he’s telling me I suck and my friends aren’t really friends to send because they’ll allowed me to go onto national TV to get shot down in front of millions of viewers.

I’m not even half way done with my book. I might only be a third of the way there. To a man, every body that read what I’ve written so far says that the book needs to be longer. Also, people want to hear more from the Charming and Beautiful Susan, as do I. They also want to know how things are going taking care of Allie now. Which, by the way, is getting better every day. Finally, people want to know more about Charity. So we’ll work all that out.

I’m looking forward to working more on it and bringing it all in to completion.